George Howe

George Winchester Howe (19 April 1900 – 24 June 1986) was an English actor who played numerous stage roles, was a frequent broadcaster on radio and television and appeared in four feature films.

Howe acted in a wide range of plays, including new and classic comedies and historical dramas and was frequently seen in works by Chekhov and Shakespeare. He was particularly known for playing Polonius in Hamlet. Most of his work was in the West End, but he also appeared in New York and toured extensively during the Second World War entertaining the troops.

Life and career Early years Howe was born in Valparaíso, Chile, on 19 April 1900, the son of Edgar Winchester Howe and his wife Beatrice, née MacQueen. His elder sister was the author Bea Howe, who married the BBC Radio conductor Mark Lubbock. He was educated at Harrow School, the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and Christ Church, Oxford, before going on to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

He made his first professional appearance on the stage at the Regent Theatre in August 1923, as Captain Udall in Robert E. Lee. In November of that year he played Puck in a starrily-cast production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Kingsway Theatre, and the following year he appeared with the Stratford-on-Avon Festival company, and in 1924–25 he was a member of the Birmingham Repertory Company.

1930–1949 In 1930 Howe joined the Old Vic company, then headed by John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, who co-opted him into an informal three-man committee who, he recalled, "discussed and hinted and generally interfered over the productions". At the Chichester Festival and then in the West End he played in Noël Coward's Look After Lulu! (1978). Also at Chichester he was in A Woman of No Importance in which The Stage said, "with but a few lines George Howe re-creates all the character, past and present, of Sir John Pontefract".

Broadcasting and cinema Howe was best known as a stage actor, but appeared frequently on radio and television. He first broadcast in 1923, together with the actress Elizabeth Pollock, performing "Imitations of London Actors and Actresses". In 1931 he played Trinculo in The Tempest in a production starring Gielgud and Richardson as Prospero and Caliban. During the 1930s he appeared in three other radio adaptations of Shakespeare plays: King John (1931), The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1936), Henry VIII (1936), and a second adaptation of The Tempest (1936). In the 1940s he played the Fool in King Lear to Gielgud's Lear, and was in radio versions of Antony and Cleopatra and Romeo and Juliet. In 1952 Howe played Samuel Pickwick in a five-part adaptation of The Pickwick Papers on BBC Television. Later television roles included Burley in Richard of Bordeaux (1955), Charles Cheeryble in Nicholas Nickleby (1957), Crassus in The Apple Cart (1957), Reginald Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend (1958), Squire Frankland in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1968), Sir Thomas Erpingham in Henry V (1979) and Euphronius in Antony and Cleopatra (1981).

Howe died in Brighton on 24 June 1986, aged 86.

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